Japan's Reiwa era is the first named from Japanese, not Chinese, poetry
When Japan unveiled the name Reiwa on 1 April 2019, it broke with tradition: its two characters came from the Man'yōshū, an eighth-century anthology of Japanese poetry, rather than from Chinese classics. The source is a headnote about a gathering to admire plum blossoms on a fair spring day with a gentle breeze.
Reiwa is the 232nd era of Japan's official calendar and began on 1 May 2019, when Naruhito became the 126th emperor, the day after his father Akihito abdicated and closed the Heisei era. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga revealed the name on live television by holding up the calligraphy on a board. A nine-member panel, including the Nobel-winning stem-cell scientist Shinya Yamanaka, drew up a shortlist from which the cabinet chose.
Translation caused a stir. The character rei most commonly means command or order, so the Foreign Ministry offered beautiful harmony as an English explanation, stressing that this was not an official translation. The literature scholar Susumu Nakanishi, widely believed to have coined the name, preferred to read rei through uruwashii, meaning fair or fine, and questioned Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's gloss of it as simply beautiful.
Half of the name was brand new. Wa has featured in 19 earlier era names, but rei had never been used. It nearly appeared in 1864, when the Tokugawa shogunate rejected a proposed name, Reitoku, fearing it could read as the emperor commanding the shogunate. Some scholars add a twist: the Man'yōshū phrase may itself echo a Chinese text from the second century AD.
The change rippled through technology and money. The Unicode Consortium reserved a code point in September 2018 for a single glyph combining the two characters, released in Unicode 12.1.0 on 7 May 2019, and Windows, macOS and iOS were updated for the new era. The Japan Mint needed about three months to prepare molds, and every coin carrying the new name had been released by October 2019.
Source: Reiwa era
